Tom Pisello, a former managing vice president at Gartner Inc., is founder and CEO of Alinean Inc., has written an article in ComputerWorld on SOA, discussing if its just a buzzword or if there is real value to be reaped by the Enterprises, Tom concludes his article with the following passage, that summarize his thoughts on the topic: The coverage SOA has received recently may make it seem like pure hype. However, the benefits are tangible and substantial. Those who have taken even minor steps on the road to implementing SOA are reaping immediate IT cost reductions and incremental business benefits. Those that have gone farther down the road, embracing enterprisewide implementation of service-oriented applications and a service-oriented, virtualized infrastructure, are finding that they have made a fundamental change in the way IT and the business invest in technology and work together.

Some excerpts from the article:

Visa offers a real-world example of an early SOA success story. Member banks had to process cardholder disputes via a paper system. Automating the process was difficult because the banks had incompatible back-end and legacy systems. SOA allows direct communication between member banks and the back-end systems, simplifying transaction research, dispute case search and Retrieval, and requests for copies of original paper receipts. Savings are said to total $52 million a year in direct operating costs and $300 million in ancillary savings. What's more, new projects have been able to reuse services from this project, helping to reduce development time and risks.Grass-root implementations of SOA such as this example are typical. As the deployments prove their value to the organization, they grow organically.

SOA Drives IT Savings for Quick Payback:
Application integration savings
Reuse of applications
Reduced project risks (Current Landscape - 15% of all projects are still canceled prior to deployment, and another 35% fail to meet schedule)
Improved application quality
Deployment savings
Improved asset utilization and consolidation

Substantial Business Benefits Add Up for SOA in the Long Run:
Improved productivity
Reduced exceptions and costs of exceptions
Faster deployment
Improved agility

Prashanth Rai

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